


The Trouble With Ghosts

by luvanderwon



Category: Havemercy Series - Jaida Jones & Danielle Bennett
Genre: Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 18:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2439362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvanderwon/pseuds/luvanderwon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, Luvander sees ghosts. Post-Steelhands. Potentially part one of a longer... thing.</p><p>Canonical character deaths mentioned but do not take place in the narrative of this fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Trouble With Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This was intended for the same verse as 'Hopes Up' by moonix and 'Ottava Rima', though they aren't referenced here. 
> 
> Mentions of a vague post-war survivor's PTSD, though it was unintentional and I don't know if it really counts given the universe/setting... I don't want to label the story overzealously, however, should anyone think there needs to be a trigger warning please let me know and I'll add one immediately.

There was a ghost sitting on the bench opposite his shop. 

He had been there for two days. Luvander had noticed him in between feathers and customers, when he glanced between the frills of his window display, or stuck his head out the door as he saw someone and their expensive purchase out. The ghost was a still point in the hurdy-gurdy of the Rue, a pale prickle amongst the season’s colourful displays of claret, silver and forest green. 

The first time Luvander saw him he had continued with his pins and his business and thought little about it. It had been over a year. He saw ghosts all the time. 

When he looked again later and the ghost was still there, silent and static and cold amongst the shifting street noise, the delicate slope of his face illuminated in the buttery gold of the street lamp, Luvander had closed his eyes to be sure. He’d breathed once, twice, through his nose, opened the left eye first but the ghost was still there. The bones of Luvander’s spine had iced up, a slow trickle of unhappiness shaping grief between each vertebra. He’d closed the curtains. 

That night, he’d dreamed old dreams. Clouds of fire and explosions that made his eyes shake, the murky smell of hot, screeching metal lingering like gun powder. He jerked awake before dawn, sweat making a stingingly slow, cold descent on his back, still hearing the screaming. Luvander hadn’t had one of those nights in a while but he remembered the shape of them; knew there was no going back to sleep with the throbbing memories curdling like off milk in his brain. He made tea in the dark, shuddering at the striking of the match to light the burner; biting back a retch at the lingering, smoky trail of burnt out wood afterwards. Once, in the early days, he’d let a match burn down to his finger tips to avoid that, but it had turned out the smell of singed, blistering skin was even worse. 

He made the tea too strong on purpose, and drank it black. 

When he fell asleep again on the sofa he dreamed of nothing – of darkness and the blood behind his eyelids: thick and suffocating. He woke up feeling worse than the first time. 

Luvander opened his curtains with a flourish in the morning because that was how he greeted new days, like there hadn’t been any bad ones before, or what was the point in keeping on. The ghost was still there, and he had to swallow around the gravel on the back of his tongue. 

Not for the first time, he considered shutting the shop for the day. The only reason he didn’t was the very expensive customer draped in Volstovic rubies hung with gold and dripping money from every well-stitched and perfectly tailored pocket who had another appointment today. Luvander didn’t like her – well, he didn’t like any of them much – but he didn’t fancy losing her custom or her recommendation to her fine friends, either. 

At lunch time, the ghost had disappeared, and Luvander was glad, breathing steadily through the peace of closing up for an hour, twitching trimmings back into place and mopping up the morning’s debris. He didn’t have an appetite yet, his stomach having been a hollow, icy gape all the time the ghost had been there, so he skipped lunch and brewed more tea. The matches still made him tremble with their tiny spark too reminiscent of something he no longer had, but his fingers shook less. 

Only when he took his tea back into the front room of the shop, the ghost was back and Luvander swore, stumbled, and spilt most of the scalding liquid into the saucer and over his fingers. He slid the cup clumsily on to the counter, tea smearing the polished surface, and ignored his dripping hand; staring. He was shaking again. 

They had never been this persistent before. Luvander saw ghosts all the time, but most of them were in faces turned the right way on the street, glimpses of other faces which didn’t belong to those bodies. He saw ghosts in the way a man wore his jacket or struck a pose with his hip. He saw them in how another man held his glass of wine, or the peculiar curve of one’s mouth when he laughed, or the trickle and wink of the way one flirted with a whore. Luvander hadn’t seen ghosts that lingered for a long time, and he had never seen one sitting for two days on the bench opposite his shop. 

Mentally, he tried writing letters, because holding a pen was out of the question. Anything he wrote in this state would look like Balfour had written it last year, back when his hands were still giving him trouble. Anyway, Luvander wasn’t entirely sure that sending a letter was the best route to banishing this apparition, so he composed it in his head instead, an attempt to soothe his nerves which would doubtless prove futile. _Dear Ghislain_ he wrote, _I can see them again. Well, just one, actually. But it’s not going away. Why in Bastion’s name aren’t you here when I need a slap of your common sense?_

After the final battle, before Rook had even been brought back and long before that scene last winter when Raphael had come back from the dead, back then Ghislain had sat stoically beside Luvander while he hallucinated. Being half blind and gashed at the throat was bound to make a man see things, he’d said in his steady, slow rumble, and even though Luvander’s wound would scar over and his sight would come back – not quite as good as it had been, not clear enough for reconnaissance now but he could still thread a needle – even though his injuries weren’t strictly permanent, they were all around his head. “That’s where you live, man,” Ghislain had reminded him time and again. “Fuck that up and of course you’ll see shit that ain’t right for a time.” 

It had been a comfort, having Ghislain explain it that way, sitting beside him in the aching, brittle silence of the Airman, all stark metal and corners without enough bodies in it. It had made sense when Luvander would see Ivory splintering down the corridor, made of light and dust motes and the sharp edges of a steel blade, or Raphael rippling like the pages of one of his tattier romans caught in spring weather, flickering through a door scarred with stab wounds, in or out of a room which had never been his. He’d catch glimpses of Merritt’s freckles in dark windows, or hear the scud of Evariste’s boots against the cast-iron boot-scraper by the front door. 

When they’d brought Rook back he’d wept, just sat in the open space of the common room and cried, because he couldn’t trust his own senses. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that the solid form of Rook’s body, the lack of lights spilling through fractures of his features, or the rough coffee grounds and grit of his voice meant he was real. Ghislain had been there then, too; shot one of his looks at Rook before he could say anything. He hadn’t looked fit for his usual verbal attacks, but Dragon Corps didn’t cry and Ghislain wasn’t taking chances. 

Once they’d moved out of the Airman and his eye was as better as it was going to be, the ghosts had mostly left him alone. 

That was the trouble with ghosts, though. They kept coming back. 

The last time he’d seen Niall, there had been a splice of thin white space from his throat to his gut. His hands had been restlessly fingering the walls of the Airman and there’d been a hole in the trickle of his laughter that sounded like a newly burst blister. He had sat backwards on the chair in Luvander’s room and watched him getting undressed but every time he’d covered his scars Niall had flickered out into a whisper Luvander couldn’t be sure he had really heard. By that point, Luvander had been almost familiar with the patchy remnants of Raphael, Ivory, Merritt and Evariste, and Rook was back for real. Niall wasn’t a frequent visitor to his projected subconscious, but Luvander had found himself chatting as he got changed, and Niall had laughed, his fingers glittering like light on mirrored glass. 

One thing he did like about his ghosts: they were cheerful, sparkling things. Even when they were broken, haunting and tattered around the edges; when they had no voices or were missing eyes or sporting empty space where they should have had hearts. They were always made out of light and they always glittered. 

Luvander stared at the ghost on the bench and forced his hands to be rational; his mind to be still. 

He paced in the back room of his shop instead of making more tea. Apart from the hallucinations and the early nightmares, Luvander had adapted fairly smoothly to civilian life after the war. He hadn’t had Balfour’s timidness and prostheses to stumble with, nor Adamo’s angrily military mindset. He missed the excitement and the adrenaline sometimes but it wasn’t something he craved like Rook or Ghislain did. Luvander only felt the loss of flying in his dreams. What he’d missed, what had caught him out over and over again with its cold press of grief biting into his bones without warning like he’d slammed a finger in the door, was the camaraderie. 

Luvander had never really been a fighter. It was luck and chance and a poker night mixture of right place, wrong time, which had won him Yesfir. She’d approved of his hair and his humour. Flying came easily to him – it came easily to most of them – or maybe their girls had made it easy for the boys they’d wanted. Perhaps flying a dragon had never been a difficult thing unless the dragon didn’t like you. Luvander remembered the easy, polished slide of Yesfir’s scales beneath his thighs, and the stretch in his back when he’d ease himself out long and low over her neck – half affectionate embrace, half aerodynamic intuition. They flew faster that way. He remembered the crunching ache of smoking hot, pungent metal that filled his nose when she laughed. He remembered peering and swiping and taking too much pride in her polish, and the way she’d turn her neck and nudge his hip with her snout; teeth bared and glittering in as much of a smile as her make up allowed for, telling him not to preen so much. She was built with scales, not ten thousand tiny mirrors for him to check the angle of his collar in. 

Luvander paced in the back room and tried to summon Yesfir’s voice, tried to remember if she’d ever had any opinions on ghosts. All he could remember though, now that he needed her, was that she’d been halfway through a joke about Crushers and their too big legs when that rock had hit her in the chest and knocked them both out of the sky. It had been the only time in that final battle that she sounded like herself – like she knew they were finished, _she_ was finished, and she wanted to go down laughing. The rock had smashed her vocal cogs but the way she’d flipped him off her back with her tail when they were close enough to the rubble to break him but not smash him into pieces said enough. It said _get yourself the fuck away from me_. So did her eyes when her head snaked down, her neck one last beautiful arc away from her shattered body, and right before her jaw broke apart on half a stone wall her eyes had met his for the last time and she’d rolled them back, all ice crystal blue and impotent shards of glory, telling him to save his own bastion damned self while he still could. Luvander had been bleeding from the neck and the eye already and he had never been a fighter, not on the ground. Maybe only Ghislain knew – for months it had seemed like there was only Ghislain _to_ know – but he’d hidden, burnt and bloody with his face a mess of anger and grief and injury – under Yesfir’s cracked memory of a wing for the rest of the slaughter. 

He’d believed, for a while when they first came back, that this was why he was the only one to see the ghosts. Because he hadn’t fought hard enough. 

In the back room, Luvander stopped pacing and sank down slowly between an old bureau he used to store trimmings, and a box full of fabric scraps in blues and greys and greens, which looked like movement on water. 

He was late to re-open for the afternoon, but when he went out there the ghost would still be watching, and he still didn’t know what to do about that. Also, he was almost out of milk and he’d have to leave the shop if he wanted more. That would mean crossing the street and walking right past that bench. 

Luvander nudged his trembling fingers up under his scarf and felt the deep pink ridges of the scar on his throat. 

He wondered if the ghost of Niall on the bench would sparkle and laugh like the one back at the Airman had done, if he got close enough. Once, before they’d left for good, he’d heard Niall singing in the kitchen with the dawn, but that time there hadn’t been any body there, not even the swirling echoes of a body made from light particles. Just Niall’s low, fruity tenor humming a filthy soldier’s song in the corner by the kitchen table, and the floor tiles cold under Luvander’s feet because he’d forgotten to put on socks. 

They’d all complained about Niall singing so early in the mornings, but now Luvander could only recall it as a far more pleasant alarm than the shrill, tinned shriek he woke up to from the clock beside his bed. 

There were no customers queuing when he squared his slim shoulders and made his way back into the shop forty-five minutes after he usually re-opened. The Rue was less busy today, a thin spring wind keeping people indoors warming their fingers. The ghost, Luvander noticed when he unlocked the door and stepped outside, did not wear gloves. 

Nor was he patchwork: no holes in his frame, no part of him blurring into the wall behind the bench. With a sick, hungry twist like burnt toast in his belly, Luvander remembered the solid, real shape of Raphael on the stairs last winter. When Luvander had held him, he’d been expecting his arms to go around air and paper, not the fabric bulk of human bone and skin and actual fucking living breathing Raphael, skinny and greyer and as self-mockingly self-important as ever. His hands hurt at the memory as he looked across the street at the ghost of Niall on the bench again. 

It could be a coincidence, of course. Or a relative. Or he could have finally cracked up and in that case, he might as well get it over with and make it known. No doubt Adamo would intervene and they’d cart him off to that Greylace Estate instead of the madhouse. He could giggle and drool on himself in corners and talk to his ghosts like the fucked up family pet, and that wouldn’t be so bad, Luvander supposed – he might even let Balfour bully him a bit, if Balfour was capable of bullying anything. It would seem fair. Balfour was the senior member of whatever sort of new dragon corps you could call that crazy experiment in miniaturisation they’d all got caught up in, and Luvander would just be a gibbering idiot chatting to spectres. 

He thought about the crisped up edges of ghost Niall’s laughter and the smokier memory of actual Niall’s jokes. He thought about singing in the kitchen and how many soldiering lyrics Niall had only known the chorus to and so he’d made up the rest of the words. He thought about how they’d never gone to the theatre together even though they’d always said they would. Niall knew some performers and could get them in cheap, and Luvander hadn’t seen nearly as many plays as he’d have liked. He hadn’t seen any since the end of the war because theatres gave him the same nauseating, seasick sadness in his gut as piano music and poetry and even, sadly, pornography, because Niall was a ghost now and they’d never go to the theatre together at all. 

He thought about the mess of hot, heavy blood on his own face and the way it had soaked russet brown and stinking like iron and fire into the collar of his uniform, and he thought about the boiling, red-gold mess of Lapis he’d seen with his one good eye from Compassus’s broad, rocking back – the colours all wrong and the dragon all wrong underneath him. He thought about Ghislain’s arm around his bruised ribs and coughing out black smoke and turning his face into the breadth of Ghislain’s chest because it was easier than looking down at the destruction they’d wrought and knowing most of his friends were broken and burning and bleeding still down there and there was nothing he could do about that. 

Luvander crossed the Rue thinking about how, afterwards, it had felt cowardly and wrong to be one of the few still alive, living martyrs with no sure place in this new world, and no girls. 

He sat on the bench next to the ghost and looked across at his shop. Feathers in the window, silver paint on the sign; the door still claiming he was closed. “You know,” he said softly to the ghost who – a few inches from Luvander’s shoulder and elbow and thigh, still seemed to be solid and human, and that was unsettling. Luvander’s stomach hurt and knotted, but he wasn’t singing yet and he was too thin. Why did everybody come back too thin. “I used to know a man who looked a lot like you,” he finished, opening his palm on his knee and turning his face, half closing his bad eye because he didn’t trust it not to lie to him. He didn’t trust anything anymore. 

Niall looked pale and thin and exhausted and miserable, but the edge of a smile which hooked the corner of his mouth was familiar, and his voice was the same when he said “hello, Luvander,” and when he reached over and slid his own hand into Luvander’s open, waiting palm, he was as warm and real and alive as Raphael had been on the stairs. 

This was the trouble with ghosts. They kept coming back.


End file.
